


trouble looks for me

by Kahika



Category: Mass Effect Trilogy
Genre: 5+1 Things, Cultural Differences, Developing Relationship, M/M, Military Backstory, Pre-Canon, Rescue
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-09
Updated: 2018-06-09
Packaged: 2019-05-19 18:00:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,627
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14878604
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kahika/pseuds/Kahika
Summary: Tarquin, he thinks suddenly. Tarquin, with his charisma and his unorthodox tactics learned at his father's knee and his engineering would know what to do, had always come up with ways to get out of any mess.Five times Tarquin saved Lantar and one time he didn't.





	trouble looks for me

**Author's Note:**

> My file name for this indicated that I started it as a treat for Spec Reqs 2017, but seeing as that was the Spec Reqs where I wrote [the 22k word monster fic](https://archiveofourown.org/works/11646414), I'm not at all surprised I only had the first scene done and one sentence descriptions of what the other scenes were supposed to be. Rediscovering this months later, I didn't understand what I wanted with one of those sentences, but thought I'd give finishing the fic a go anyway.

> _bullies._

This is his first time on Palaven and he hates boot camp already.

Well. Not boot camp itself, the training is fine. But the people, specifically the Palaveni assholes trying to kick the shit out of him, leave much to be desired. And here he'd always been told the homeworld bred civilized people, not like the lowlifes hiding out on Invictus. Same shit, different reason. At least at home, this kind of thing's usually over money or drugs or broken deals, not something he can't even help.

"Hey," calls another voice; also a Palaveni accent, interestingly. " _Hey!_ Knock it off!"

There are surly remarks about CO's pets and brass family, but his fellow recruits do slink away from him, leaving Lantar to struggle to his feet.

"Hey," the voice repeats again, gentler this time, and then its owner is bending down in front of him with one hand outstretched. "It's okay. Don't try to move too quickly. I've got you."

Lantar squints. Light plates. Lighter markings. Brass family. "I know you," he says, waving a hand at him before taking the one offered. "You're that Major's son. Victus." The name had stuck in his head because it was so close to the name of his homeworld.

The Major's son grimaces, but gingerly helps him up. "I prefer Tarquin. Look, I know what it's like to have people expecting things from you because of where you come from."

He refers, of course, to Lantar's markings, advertising that he's from Invictus to all the racists in boot camp. "You don't know _anything_ ," Lantar replies, yanking his hand away. He's pretty sure that being a Victus doesn't get this guy beaten up.

For some reason, Victus stays anyway. "I know the way to the medbay," he says. "I'll help you there."

"And tell the doctor what?" He knows the game: If the assholes get punished, they'll take it out on him.

"I'll tell her I kicked your ass sparring," Victus offers, and Lantar's mandibles tilt up in approval.

> _loneliness._

Most of the unit uses shore leave as an opportunity to go out and get drunk. Lantar uses it as an opportunity to keep to himself without being harrassed. He's not lonely when he doesn't even like them.

At least, that's what he tells himself for five minutes. On Invictus, he'd grown up with few but loyal friends, a handful of families and tagalong orphans banding together for protection from the criminals pushing their luck while in hiding. Surrounded by Palaveni snobs and people from richer colonies with delusions of grandeur, he misses that bond, misses his friends, misses his family.

He's flicking through vidmail on his omni-tool when a shadow falls in the doorway.

"Hey."

He looks up to find Victus strolling in with a couple of bottles of - Drossix Blue, he reads when Victus offers one to him.

"I don't need your pity booze," he snaps. "Or your pity company. Don't you have other military brats to hang out with?"

"You know, you're not the only one who doesn't want to spend time with a bunch of racist assholes," says Victus, still holding out the bottle. "They only want me there because they think I'll ask my dad to give my friends good postings after boot camp."

Lantar eyes him. "Will you?"

Victus gives the smallest klack of his mandibles, saving the real threat for when they're in front of him. "They're not my friends."

"What," says Lantar. "And I am?"

"You're not a racist asshole trying to use me for my father," says Victus. "That's a pretty good start."

True enough. Relaxing, Lantar takes the bottle, opening it with a twist of his talons. He'd been young when he started drinking - beer's cheaper back home than clean water is - but it was with food, and it wasn't binge drinking like most people here seem to be obsessed with on shore leave.

Also, it hadn't been this _good_. He inspects the label again, and, catching Victus's inquiring look, explains, "We don't really get this back home."

"Home's Invictus, right?" Victus says, waving his Drossix Blue in an arc vaguely resembling his markings. Lantar tenses, but all Victus says is, "I've never been there, and I've lived on a _lot_ of colonies - we usually got moved on after one of Dad's stunts."

"Yeah, not a lot of military presence on Invictus," Lantar says. At the spaceports, mainly, and many of them taking bribes from the criminals.

"Tell me about it," says Victus. "C'mon, my family name's in it."

"How self-centered," Lantar says dryly, but to his surprise, Victus laughs, and nods, the weirdo, so he tells him anyway, and Victus - no, Tarquin - Tarquin _listens_.

> _slavers._

Their intel suggests these slavers are selling to the Collectors, and they're gaining on him, and Lantar's running out of hallway. He tries the door at the end, finds it locked, but he's out of omni-gel after their vehicle was ambushed earlier.

Raising his gun, he turns around to face the batarians - and oh, there are more of them than he remembers when he started running. Against this many guns, he's not sure how long his shield will hold out.

Tarquin's combat drone suddenly generates before him and starts shocking the batarians, and as their attention is drawn to it, he hears gunfire further up the hall, behind them.

It's enough for him to snap out of his fear and start firing on the slavers too, and Tarquin closes in behind them. The two of them and the drone do what he couldn't alone, acting on their training and something more like their memorized tactics instead of his blind panic. Once the drone's shields are down, it detonates, taking out the last two slavers, and Lantar crosses the hall to Tarquin, his mandibles tilting up within his helmet.

"Thanks for the save," he says.

"For the assist," Tarquin corrects him. "You could have gotten out of that on your own."

He shakes his head. "No, I couldn't - I panicked. I forgot everything."

"But you remembered once I showed up," Tarquin says, clapping a hand on his elbow. "It was still in you."

"Victus! Sidonis!" their CO barks over their comms. "Back in the cargo bay: We've got prisoners."

His eyes still on Tarquin, Lantar puts his hand over Tarquin's for a moment, before gently shaking him off to head back. Most people would have let go as soon as they'd made the point of the gesture, but Tarquin had stayed.

> _indecision._

Light shines in Tarquin's eyes as he rambles about his newest idea for assistive tech he wants to make to help the disabled and the elderly. When he first saw him in boot camp, Lantar wouldn't have thought he'd ever have seen anyone who'd need it except in the vids, the Victus family too high up in the world to be bothered with any of that, but now he knows Tarquin is passionately, adorably genuine about this, and would much rather be using his considerable engineering skills to help people instead of killing them, to put people back together instead of taking enemy equipment apart.

He also knows now that he's hopelessly into Tarquin. He'd like to think he knows better than to hope for more with a Colonel's son, but every once in a while Tarquin smiles at him a little too long, or touches him a little too intimately for the usual military roughhousing, and Lantar's hopes...

Well. He's trying to hold them down, but part of him kind of wants to say something, besides the occasional "that sounds great" and "oh, yeah" as Tarquin names tasks that he's seen people struggling with back home after getting beaten up by thugs.

"Thanks for listening," Tarquin says eventually. "I know you're not really interested -"

"I'm interested," he protests.

"Okay," Tarquin says, unconvinced. "Just, your heart didn't seem in it when you were answering me."

"My heart was right here," he says. If anything, his heart was in it a little too much. "I was just thinking about how amazing -" _you are for wanting to do this, for having the brains and the skills to do this -_ "- this would be for so many people back home. If it didn't get stolen, anyway. Fucking Invictus: Some lowlife would find a way to make money off it. Gotta support themselves in hiding -"

Tarquin's mandibles tilt up. "Okay," he repeats, and he leans forward and presses his forehead to Lantar's, light and just for a moment but definitely _there_.

Lantar swallows. "What does that mean on the homeworld?" They've had their share of homeworld versus colonial cultural misunderstandings over the years, especially at boot camp where more often than not those misunderstandings were with the assholes who shared a home planet with Tarquin; they've gotten to the point where these misunderstandings are mostly something to laugh and tease each other about, but this could mean something completely different to him.

Tarquin searches his gaze. "That meant I'm into you, even though you're a colonial hick. What does it mean to you?"

Steadying himself by taking hold of Tarquin's shoulder, he lets his forehead rest on his. "This means I'm into you even though you're a homeworld snob."

Tarquin's eyes go warm, and he puts his hand over Lantar's, keeping him there. "I'd hoped you were," he says softly.

> _saying goodbye._

"Lantar."

He looks up from his bed to find Tarquin in the doorway, fire in his subvocal.

"I heard the captain talking to high command - she said you were separating." When Lantar's silent, Tarquin crosses the room to kneel on the floor between his legs. "Were you planning on telling me?"

"Sort of," Lantar admits. He hadn't figured out how to tell him, but he was working on it. "I didn't want you to find out like _that_ , but... I didn't want to say goodbye."

"Coward," Tarquin says, cuttingly matter of fact. Lantar sighs, and Tarquin adds, "I'm not _mad_. I'm just... I wish you'd stay."

"You know I was _always_ planning to leave after my mandatory term, not stay," he says. "I'm not cut out for this: The - the structure, the Palaveni shits. I'm not like you."

"That's what I like about you," says Tarquin, talons curling over his hip. "Even if you call me a Palaveni shit."

He knows very well that Lantar doesn't mean him. Lantar looks down at his hand, and then at his face. "Then come with me," he says impulsively. "I know you'd rather be out there working on your assistive tech."

"You _know_ why I can't."

Not for the first time, Lantar wonders what it's like to come from a family that's _seen_ , observed the way the Victuses are. Tarquin's complained of it enough, and more since his father made General, but it's not the same as walking in his boots.

"So when are you shipping out?" Tarquin prompts him.

"Two days," he says. "Oh six hundred."

"Two days? More like a day and a half," Tarquin snaps, but almost as soon as his outburst is finished he presses their foreheads together and murmurs, "I don't want you to go."

Lantar cups his cheek in one hand, traces one of those white markings. Tarquin Victus is the only good thing about being here. "I still don't want to say goodbye," he says. "I can't."

"Then don't say anything," says Tarquin.

Tarquin's more talkative than Lantar but also better at shutting up, and at shutting up Lantar with a press of foreheads and a touch to the waist. His teeth and talons and tongue ensure Lantar doesn't say a single coherent word in that bed, only wordless groans and fragmented syllables. Even afterwards when Lantar regains the ability to put sentences together, Tarquin's big mouth stops him from putting together the one he wanted just by blurting out, "I love you."

The farewell falls apart on Lantar's tongue, and all he's left with is, "I love you," part reassurance, part apology.

> _Omega._

Lantar paces, his talons in his fringe. The viciousness Garrus can display as Archangel without even raising a gun - the cutting words, the harsh subvocals - are all very well when he's using it against gang members, but turning it on members of the squad for daring to want more than war, daring to want to use some of their profits to live comfortably instead of just on more equipment to fight the gangs, is terrifying. Not just because Archangel the persona is terrifying, but because it shows how deep Garrus is in this: Too deep. Sure, Garrus has been moody lately, but Lantar had never thought he would lash out at his own team.

It makes him too unpredictable now. Lantar's been wanting out too, just the same as Vortash and Mierin, but he's too close to Garrus to bring it up himself, and if this is the way Garrus is reacting, there's no telling what he might do if Lantar actually left.

That offer the Blue Suns made him is starting to look more appealing. He's been trying to hold them off while he tries to come up with a way out of this - wanting out doesn't mean he wants Garrus _dead_ \- but if he doesn't tell them who Archangel is, they'll kill him; if he tells Garrus, sure, they might foil the assassination attempt, but he'll probably still die for Garrus's stupid war; if he takes the deal, he might actually get out of this thing alive.

Tarquin, he thinks suddenly. Tarquin, with his charisma and his unorthodox tactics learned at his father's knee and his engineering would know what to do, had always come up with ways to get out of any mess. They've been talking less and less since he left the military, video chats turning into vidmail turning into e-mail and the days between them turning into weeks turning into months. It sounds like Tarquin's career is on the rise, so they've both been light on details, Tarquin as his assignments get more and more confidential, Lantar at first out of the shame of ending up on Omega and then because someone with a promising military career probably shouldn't be caught with too many details of an Omegan vigilante. But Lantar needs him now.

He calls him. He's changed his comm address since the last time they talked, the secrecy of Archangel operations necessitating frequent changes, and Tarquin might not accept calls from unknown addresses. He has no idea what time it is wherever Tarquin is, or what kind of mission he might be on. Neither of these things occur to him as his omni-tool rings and then goes to voicemail.

At the sound of Tarquin's recorded voice, Lantar sags against the wall. He'd forgotten how good it is to have his voice in his ear, though of course it's much better when it's because Tarquin's pressed up close to him.

"Tarquin," he says after the tone, realizing he had absolutely no plan for this possibility. "It's Lantar. I'm in a bit of trouble on Omega - hell, a _lot_ of trouble. It's this gang, and my leader going crazy, and I'm caught in the middle, and - Tarquin, fuck, I don't know what to do. They'll kill me if I don't tell, but I don't want to die for him either. I need your help."

Sinking to the floor, he wonders what Tarquin will think of this jumbled message. "Please call me back," he finishes.

His sleep that night is fitful, and he keeps checking his omni-tool every time he wakes up. The only message on his omni-tool in the morning is another threat from the Blue Suns. Tarquin not trying to contact him is probably a sign.

He knows what to do now.


End file.
